|
| |
Parade Magazine
November 6, 1988
IN STEP WITH:
Kate Nelligan
By JAMES BRADY
Kate Nelligan- hailed in a review as "a working class Rita Hayworth" –
could be the brightest star on Broadway this season, and she loves it!
KATE NELLIGAN HAS MADE SOME BIG movies and done three Broadway plays. For each
play, she was nominated for a Tony Award--the theater's most significant honor. Yet
most people don't know who she is. I asked if that bothered her. "No," said
Kate, shrugging off fame. "My friends know my name."
That's an actress you've got to love, and I think when she opens for the fourth time on
Broadway--on Nov. 10 in Spoils of War--not only her pals will know who Kate is. We all
will. When she starred in Spoils off-Broadway last May, she had the usually staid
New York Times hailing her as "ravishing ... remarkable ... a working-class Rita
Hayworth." I wondered what she thought of that. Kate laughed and said, "I loved
it, because I'd done so many high-class roles and because I come from the working
class."
She grew up in Toronto, where her father was in charge of the ice rinks
and recreational parks, dropped out of college to study acting in England, ran out of
money and returned to Canada to teach dancing at an Arthur Murray school. But she hadn't
quit on England, or acting, and with astonishing cheek Kate wrote to 150 wealthy Canadian
families she didn't even know, asking them to underwrite her studies. Improbably, the
money came in, and for the next nine years she was a Londoner, winning rave reviews for
her stage performances and making some good movies, like Eye of the Needle and
some bad ones.
In 1981, Nelligan went Hollywood. "It just wasn’t my town," she told me.
"I didn't have an address book or friends or a home or a car." The following
year she was in New York, where she bought a place and set out to shed the English accent
she’d picked up. "Now it's home," she says, "the only home I
have." Is she ever envious of the huge salaries people like Meryl Streep are paid? It
never seems to have occurred to her. "I’m being paid a lot of money to do fine
work," she told me. "That’s worth a fortune. I would be envying the person
who got this role [in Spoils of War] if I didn’t and I were sitting out
there in the audience. That’s envy!"
When she played the title role of the Greek
mother in Eleni, a movie which the First Family declared a favorite--Kate was
invited to the White House for dinner. "I sat next to George Shultz," she
recalled, "and on.the other side was the Aga Khan. I didn't know what to call him:
Aga? Khan? So I settled on 'my friend.' Walter Payton [of the Chicago Bears] was there,
and I really wanted to be sitting next to him. I really get excited about great
athletes."
One other thing about White House dinners: "They send this
squeaky-clean Marine to the hotel to escort you, and then afterward, at midnight, he
disappears like a pumpkin."
BRADY’S BITS
Nelligan told me her play, Spoils of War,
would open first in Toronto, her hometown, then come into New York for previews.
"Yes," she said, "there’ll be a certain amount in the papers about
‘hometown girl makes good.’ But that’s fine. We want to sell tickets."
Nelligan wants to have a child someday, but when I asked about marriage, she teasingly
said only, "Maybe," What about commercials—would she do them for the right
money? Kate seemed puzzled. "I don’t know what I could sell," she said. I
dunno, Kate…You sold me.
Sidebar:
BORN: March 16,
1951, in London,
Ontario
THEATER: in London, plays
include Barefoot
in the Park, 1972;
Misalliance, 1973;
A Streetcar
Named Desire,
1973; The
Playboy of the
Western World,
1973; Knuckle,
1974;
Heartbreak House,
1975. On
Broadway, plays
include Plenty,
1982; A Moon for
the Misbegotten,
1984; Serious
Money, 1988.
FILMS: Include
The Romantic
Englishwoman, 1975 (debut);
The Count of Monte Cristo, 1976;
Dracula, 1979; Eye of the Needle, 1980;
Without a Trace,
1983, Eleni, 1985.
Home | Biography |
Filmography | Theatre Credits
| Awards | Articles and Interviews
| In the Works
  
|
